Newsweek's Evan Thomas (11/14/09) on Washington gridlock and partisanship:

Diehard right-wing congressmen do not deserve all the blame. Obama tried to foster bipartisanship at the outset of his administration, but he didn't try very hard, and his fellow Democrats can be just as rigidly partisan on the left. Obama seems reduced to fencing with Fox News, which won't get him very far or earn him a place in the history books.

I'm not sure how much more ground Obama (or Democrats in general) is supposed to give. They added a bunch of non-stimulative tax cuts into their stimulus package in order to attract Republican support (which didn't work). They took the most progressive ideas off the table in the health care debate (single-payer and a robust public option), and in the House adopted the "Stupak amendment" limiting abortion rights. The White House almost immediately sent almost 20,000 troops to Afghanistan, and seems ready to send more.

If the notion is that the Democrats (in Congress or the White House) have pushed hard-left policies, I'd like to see some evidence. Thomas (like Doyle McManus in the L.A. Times last week) points to the White House's criticism of Fox News Channel as an example of their partisanship--perhaps because there aren't many other actual examples.

So what, exactly, is the point of all this "Obama isn't bipartisan enough" chatter? Here we go--presidents move to the right to be successful:

The two greatest postwar presidents understood this. Dwight Eisenhower governed in the 1950s by deftly uniting center and right, and Ronald Reagan did the same in the 1980s.

And:

Since taking office, Obama has so far failed to win the battle for the center. The post-election polls show that the country is, if anything, drifting to the right. Obama needs to win some of those drifters back if he wants to get things done.

A Democrat needs to go further right--somehow you just knew that would be the advice from the corporate media.

From ABC World News, 11/11/09:

CHARLIE GIBSON: We understand he's raising new questions about a number of plans that are in front of him. What new questions are there to be asked after all this time?

MARTHA RADDATZ: Well, you would think he'd be through with the questions, Charlie.

Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times (11/15/09):

Barack Obama is in danger of giving deliberation a bad name.

David Broder, Washington Post (11/16/09-- headline: "Enough Afghan Debate")

It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right.

CNN's Lou Dobbs (11/9/09) on the Fort Hood shootings:

I think we should point out, too, for the first time in my memory in eight years, we have seen quickly CAIR step up on the day of the shootings, the largest representative of the Islamic faith step up, and condemn the shootings instantly.

CAIR is the Council on American-Islamic Relations--a group that has, by its own count, issued dozens of statements condemning terrorist acts over the years, and coordinated an anti-terrorism fatwa endorsed by 340 U.S. Muslim organizations. As CAIR put it:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has a clear record of consistently and persistently condemning terrorism. Yet American Muslim groups like CAIR get repeatedly asked the question why have Muslims not spoken out against terrorism? The fact is they have, but who is listening?

Not Lou Dobbs, apparently.

The headline and lead of a New York Times piece today:

Trick for Democrats Is Juggling Ideology and Pragmatism
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON -- Democrats have displayed a striking degree of pragmatism in seeking to push the health care bill through Congress, embracing or rejecting ideological considerations as needed to keep the legislation moving.

By "ideology," the Times means policy ideas that are popular with voters and that would be more likely to reduce the costs of the healthcare system and cover more people (single-payer, a truly robust public plan). By "pragmatism," they mean the things that are less likely to reduce costs, or the trade-offs Democratic leaders have made in an attempt to win conservative support (excluding coverage for abortion services, for example). The choice of such language is intended to send a political message about what policy ideas are wise, and which are not--based on ideology, not pragmatism.

In his New York Times column, David Brooks cheers the rise of suburban independent voters in this week's midterms elections, crediting them with Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. Brooks has made a career out of singing the praises of suburban Americans, all the while suggesting that they are somewhat ignored. While liberals and conservatives have their own media machines and think tanks, Brooks writes:

Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don't have any of this. They don't have institutional affiliations. They don't look to certain activist lobbies for guidance. There aren't many commentators who come from an independent perspective.

If he's talking about centrists, it doesn't make much sense; actually, middle-of-the-road think tanks tend to dominate the media discussion.  (Perhaps Brooks has heard of Brookings?) But he tries to explain their significance this way:

The first thing to say is that this recession has hit the new suburbs hardest, exactly where independents are likely to live. According to a survey by the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, 76 percent of suburbanites say they or someone they know have lost a job in the past year.

While that does sound suspiciously like a think tank catering to, well, those think tank-less independents, are those numbers very alarming? An Ipsos/Reuters survey from June found that 80 percent of Americans knew someone who lost a job. A July Marist poll on New York state residents found that "82 percent of city voters and 79 percent of those in the suburbs" knew someone who'd lost a job in the past six months. Maybe Brooks' suburbs aren't so special after all.

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, commenting on a tax increase in California:

That could happen on the federal level. Already Nancy Pelosi and her far-left crew want to raise the top federal tax rate to 45 percent. That's not capitalism. That's Fidel Castro stuff, confiscating wages that people honestly earn.

Setting aside the truth of the charge against Pelosi, Fidel Castro must have been the president of the United States in 1982-86, when the top rate was 50 percent. Or maybe all of the 1970s, when it was 70 percent. Or from 1950-63, when it was 91 percent.

The Washington Post reported (11/5/09) that some Democrats are "questioning whether they should emphasize job creation over some of the more ambitious items on the president's agenda." A couple paragraphs later, reporters Michael Shear and Paul Kane elaborate:

Moderate and conservative Democrats took a clear signal from Tuesday's voting, warning that the results prove that independent voters are wary of Obama's far-reaching proposals and mounting spending, as well as the growing federal debt.

The implication that "job creation" is somehow at odds with "mounting spending" and "ambitious" or "far-reaching" government proposals is a another example of the neo-Hooverism that corporate reporters seem to instinctively subscribe to. In reality, spending money is one of the basic tools governments have for creating jobs during a recession--and cutting government spending is one of the surest ways to make that recession deeper.

It's worth noting that none of the sources actually quoted in the article makes the case that cutting federal spending would be a good way of creating jobs.

O'Reilly interviewing John Stossel, who left ABC for Fox Business Network (11/3/09):

O'REILLY: You committed the cardinal sin of all time. You left a liberal network, and you went to a traditional right-leaning network. So you're never, ever going to be liked again by anyone. Does that make you sad?

STOSSEL: Well, I live with these people. They all live in my neighborhood. So that makes me sad.

O'REILLY: Move out to Long Island where I live, because I live with the folks.

STOSSEL: I like taking the subway to work.

O'REILLY: You're a pansy. Come out to Long Island. All right?

For anyone keeping score, you can find aerial maps of what is purportedly O'Reilly's humble Long Island home. Man of the people, indeed.

Under the headline "Va., N.J. Give GOP Reason to Celebrate," USA Today's front-page election report (11/4/09) featured this quote from GOP strategist Frank Donatelli:

The warning is that if you're in a moderate district, or you're in a moderate-to-conservative state, you should think twice before you rubberstamp Obama's agenda.

Well, there were two districts choosing representatives and two states picking governors yesterday. Both the districts, including the one generally described as "moderate," went for the Democratic candidate, so it's not clear what warning that sends about Obama's agenda.

In both states, the Democrat lost the governor's race, and one of them, New Jersey incumbent Jon Corzine, can fairly be described as politically close to Obama. But New Jersey, which has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992, is not a "moderate-to-conservative" state;  Corzine lost the race based on local issues involving corruption and property taxes.

In the state that can be described as moderate-to-conservative, Virginia, Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds went out of his way not to "rubberstamp Obama's agenda"--coming out against allowing "card check" union certification, suggesting he would opt-out from a "public option" health insurance program, running ads touting his opposition to Obama's climate change proposals, and declaring in the final debate of the campaign, "I'm not afraid of going against my fellow Democrats when they're wrong."

So of the four top electoral contests, only one fit Donatelli's model of Democrats getting a warning about how they should appeal to moderate or conservative voters; in that race, the Democrat took Donatelli's advice--and was soundly trounced, based on the Obama voters from 2008 staying home in 2009.

One is tempted to ask whether a source's claims have to make any kind of logical sense to appear on the front page of USA Today. But given that "move to the right" is always the corporate media's advice to Democrats after an election--whether they win or lose--it's a safe bet that they thought Donatelli was making sense.

In this week's cover story, Newsweek's Sharon Begley seems to think Al Gore's new book is good--but he's still too wonky:

To anyone with bad memories of how Gore's fact-filled debate performances against George W. Bush in 2000 failed to connect with voters, it may come as no surprise that Our Choice has a graphic on "how a wind turbine works," and a long section that begins: "Conventional hydrothermal plants are built according to one of three different designs. The steam can be taken directly through the turbine and then recondensed...."

A wind turbine GRAPHIC! In a book about green energy!? What on Earth was he thinking.

As to our memories of those 2000 debates, maybe Begley meant to type "reporters" instead of "voters." As Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler has been doggedly remembering for years now,  actual voters seemed to think Gore did pretty well in those debates--"instant polls of viewers credited Gore with a rather decisive win." The media created a different narrative--one of a petulant and sighing Gore who couldn't behave himself. And that's the way that they want everyone else to remember it.

On November 1, New York Times reporter Alissa Rubin has a look back at her experience as a war correspondent in Iraq. It's mostly interesting, though when she gets to the part where she draws the big lessons, things turn for the worse:

In my five years in Iraq, all that I wanted to believe in was gunned down. Sunnis and Shiites each committed horrific crimes, and the Kurds, whose modern-looking cities and Western ways seemed at first so familiar, turned out to be capable of their own brutality. The Americans, too, did their share of violence, and among the worst they did was wishful thinking, the misreading of the winds and allowing what Yeats called "the blood-dimmed tide" to swell. Could they have stopped it? Probably not. Could it have been stemmed so that it did less damage, saved some of the fathers and brothers, mothers and sons? Yes, almost certainly, yes.

"Americans, too" committed violence in Iraq? Well, yes.  And "among the worst they did was wishful thinking"? Well, that's one way to put it.

The Los Angeles Times (11/2/09) gives readers a mostly upbeat account about the use of unmanned drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan-- weapons that have killed hundreds in Pakistan in recent years. But Times reporter Julian Barnes tells us their popularity with U.S. military officials has "changed the nature of the current policy debate in Washington."  The evidence:

The technology allows us to project power without vulnerability," said a senior Defense official. "You don't have to deploy as many people. And in the modern age you want as little stuff forward as long as you can achieve the effects as if you had lots of people forward."

But some officials caution that policymakers should not rely too heavily on the unmanned drones.

"It has made some people feel there can be a pure counter-terrorism mission without any counter-insurgency strategy," said a government official. "But that isn't truly viable without taking on a certain amount of risk."

Huh. So some anonymous government officials really seem to love them, while other anonymous government officials think they should be used in conjunction with other types of warfare. What a debate!

In the same piece, readers are told that in Pakistan the drones are unpopular--"much of the population believes they have killed civilians as well as militants." In other words, they believe in things that happen to be true.

Once you've given up trying to defend the idea that Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan can be understood as anything other than irony, the fallback position is generally that everyone else is just as biased.  Or as the headline over John Harwood's piece in the New York Times (11/2/09) puts it, "If Fox Is Partisan, It Is Not Alone."

To back up this assertion, Harwood--who's the chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, and host of the New York Times Special Edition on MSNBC--relies on surveys by Scarborough Research that asked about the partisan identification of the audiences of cable channels.  These surveys, Harwood asserts, reveal the "partisan fragmentation" of TV news audiences: If Fox viewers are 51 percent Republican and 31 percent Democrat (in 2004-05), so what--CNN viewers are 50 percent Democrat and only 29 percent Republican, and MSNBC's are 54/27 Democratic/Republican (in 2008-09; for some reason, Harwood doesn't provide the most recent data for Fox's audience).

A mirror image, right?  Well, maybe a funhouse mirror.  What Harwood crucially neglects to mention is that a lot more people in the U.S. public  identify as Democrats than Republicans; if you average a large number of polls on party identification, as Pollster.com does, you come up with Democrats being about 35 percent of all adults and Republicans at 22 percent.  You would expect a channel that was equally attractive to Democrats and Republicans, then, to have about 1.6 Democratic viewers for every Republican.

Now, CNN and MSNBC do attract a few more Democrats--about 1.8 to 1 and 2 to 1, respectively. But there's no comparison to the slant of Fox's audience, which has only 0.6 Democrats for every Republican.  Look at it this way: If each channel's current audience were a hundred people, CNN would have to add two Republicans to achieve partisan parity; MSNBC would need to find five more Republicans. Fox News, on the other hand, would have to find 51 more Democrats; for every Republican now watching, there's a "missing" Democrat.

In other words--Fox News is not the same kind of animal as either CNN or MSNBC, despite Harwood's efforts to pretend that it is.

Today's Washington Post (11/2/09) notes the White House's apparent softening towards the Israeli side in Mideast negotiations (the headline is "Israel Putting Forth 'Unprecedented' Concessions, Clinton Says," a good indication of the current administration stance). The Post tells us that the Palestinian position "appears to have hardened in recent days," with "little room to negotiate on the key demand for a settlement freeze."

But the paper's summary of the Palestinian position does little to explain this "key demand":

The Palestinians regard the land occupied by about 300,000 West Bank settlers as part of a future Palestinian state, and consider continued settlement activity an effort to influence negotiations.

Israel promised to halt settlements under previous international agreements, and Palestinian officials say they want those promises fulfilled.

The primary Palestinian objection to Israeli settlements is not that they are "an effort to influence negotiations," or because Israel has "promised" to do something about them. These settlements, as colonies established in the wake of a military occupation, are violations of international law; any attempts to obscure that reality misinform readers.

Afghan activist and politician Malalai Joya has been in the U.S. to discuss her book A Woman Among Warlords. As noted by Eric Garris at Antiwar.com, Joya's was treated very differently by CNN than by CNN International. Specifically, Joya's mention of the military occupation of her country seemed to offend CNN host Heidi Collins (10/28/09):

Again, "occupation" would certainly be your word. A lot of people would take great issue with you calling the U.S. presence in Afghanistan in your country an" occupation."

It's not clear to whom Collins is referring when she speaks of people who would take "great issue" with Joya's characterization. As Juan Cole put it, "that the U.S. and NATO are militarily occupying Afghanistan is recognized by the U.N. Security Council and is a simple fact of international law."

Or ask the International Committee of the Red Cross:

Once a situation exists which factually amounts to an occupation the law of occupation applies--whether or not the occupation is considered lawful.

Therefore, for the applicability of the law of occupation, it makes no difference whether an occupation has received Security Council approval, what its aim is, or indeed whether it is called an "invasion", "liberation", "administration" or "occupation." As the law of occupation is primarily motivated by humanitarian considerations, it is solely the facts on the ground that determine its application.